Here’s a fun Christmas game you can play with people of all ages! Learn the tips on how to present the “What’s In Santa’s Bag” game and how to easily play it this holiday season!
For the past 4 years my side of the family gets together to play a few Christmas games during our holiday get together. In total we’re 11 people, including 5 kids and 6 adults. With me as the party host and judge of the games, we get to have 5 teams of a kid and an adult for some good clean fun.
This What’s In Santa’s Bag Christmas game was fun to play last year but most importantly because they didn’t know they were playing it when it was first presented! First, to prepare, the day before everyone showed, I “shopped” my house for 30 random items of all different sizes, colors and shapes to fill in a fabric bag.
To play, I bought out the fabric bag and told them they would have 1 minute to silently observe me taking the items out and laying them on the table. I shared that all these items had something in common but I wouldn’t tell them part two of the game until after the minute was up. I made sure to make some movement in turning items over to spreading them out so the items would hopefully be imprinted on their memory a bit more.
After the minute was up, let everyone know that this game is called “What’s in Santa’s Bag?” and that it was a memory game!
Each of the 5 teams was given one of my printable game sheets (which you can find for free on the link above). They then found a quiet spot and tried to recall all 30 items that were in the bag.
I got some groans, some laughs and some worried looks, but everyone quickly got to work recalling what they remembered.
After 3 minutes was up, we gathered around as I took out each item and people crossed them off. On the fly I decided to award some bonus point opportunities! If you wrote the item down and got it right, you got one point, but if you put in an extra description word in your answer you got two points! For example, if you wrote “paper plate” you got one point, but if you wrote “blue paper plate” you got two! If you wrote “sock” you got one point but “yoda sock” you got two!
While there were some groans over this activity, there were also lots of laughs and this What’s in Santa’s Bag Christmas game was fun to play with different generations and ages as who couldn’t use more memory building practice?!
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